Beginning
Of The End
Of The Monsoon?
By Geoffrey Lean
Independent
07 December 2003
Measures
to fight global warming will have to be at least four times stronger
than the Kyoto Protocol if they are to avoid the melting of the polar
ice caps, inundating central London and many of the world's biggest
cities, concludes a new official report.
The report, by a
German government body, says that even if it is fully implemented, the
protocol will only have a "marginal attenuating effect" on
the climate change. But last week even this was thrown into doubt amid
contradictory signals from the Russian government as to whether it will
allow the treaty to come into effect.
Global warming already
kills 150,000 people a year worldwide and the rate of climate change
is soon likely to exceed anything the planet has seen "in the last
million years" says the report, produced by the German Advisory
Council on Global Change for a meeting of the world's environment ministers
to consider the future of the treaty in Milan this week.
It concludes that
the protocol must urgently be brought into force, but only as a first
step, insisting that "catastrophic" climate change "can
now only be prevented if climate protection targets are set at substantially
higher levels than those agreed internationally until now".
The report, written
by eight leading German professors, says that "dangerous climatic
changes" will become "highly probable" if the world's
average temperature is allowed to increase to more than 2 degrees centigrade
above what it was before the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Beyond that level
the West Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland ice cap would begin gradually
to melt away, eventually raising sea levels world wide by up to 30 feet,
submerging vast areas of land and key cities worldwide. London, New
York, Miami, Bombay, Calcutta, Sydney, Shanghai, Lagos and Tokyo would
be among those largely submerged by such a rise.
Above this mark
too, other "devastating" and "irreversible" changes
would be likely to take place. These include a cessation of the Indian
monsoon and the ending of the Gulf Stream, which would dramatically
worsen the climate in Britain and western Europe, even as the world
warms. Another risk is the so-called "runaway greenhouse"
where rising temperatures lead to the release of huge reservoirs methane
stored in permafrost and the oceans, adding to global warming and starting
a self-reinforcing cycle that would eventually make the earth uninhabitable.
To avoid such catastrophe,
the report says that industrialised countries will have to cut emissions
of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide by at least 20 per cent by 2020,
and by up to 60 per cent by 2050. The Kyoto Protocol would at best cut
them by 5 per cent by 2012, and probably less, even if it were brought
into force and fully implemented.
In the meantime
the world looks as if it will greatly exceed the targets. Writing in
The Independent on Sunday today, Michael Meacher, the former environment
minister, calculates that global emissions of greenhouse gases could
increase by 75 per cent by 2020, "putting the world well on the
way to doomsday".